3 CAKE Features to Easily Manage Affiliate Commissions

To maintain a competitive advantage as a network, you need to keep your affiliate partners happy. And one way to do that is to incentivize them with increased affiliate commissions for high-quality, high-volume traffic.

However, when you’re managing a large number of affiliates and campaigns, it can be difficult to keep up with all the commission changes. And if the change doesn’t go into effect, your affiliate won’t be pleased. You’ll be playing catch-up with end-of-month reconciliations or trying to make good on the error.

To help you stay ahead of changes and optimize your profit margins, CAKE provides three commission management features.

Affiliate Commission Tiers

This feature enables you to create custom tiers —bronze, silver, and gold— and assign each affiliate to a tier and associated commission. When an admin user of CAKE assigns a campaign to an affiliate or the affiliate applies for a campaign in the Affiliate Portal, CAKE ensures they receive the appropriate commission for the offer based on their designated affiliate tier.

For example, if you have a new affiliate for a holiday shopping offer, you may assign them to the bronze affiliate (1 percent revenue share), then move them up to silver (3 percent rev share) or eventually gold (5 percent rev share) as they demonstrate improved performance over time.

Volume-Based Tiers

This feature enables you to create different commission tiers based on the quantity of traffic an affiliate sends to an offer.

For example, if you are trying to incentivize affiliates to send in a large volume of clicks or conversions to their campaign, you can set up one commission amount for conversions 1-100 (paid at $1.00 Cost per Acquisition/CPA), another for conversions 101-250 (paid out at $1.50 CPA), and another for conversions 251-500 (paid out at $2.00 CPA.)

Future-Dated Commissions

This feature enables you to easily manage commission changes owed to your affiliate(s) by setting a date for a commission change to occur.

For example, if you have negotiated a commission increase on your offer that will go into effect on the first of the month, you can configure that future-dated commission change within CAKE. This is especially helpful when the first of the month falls on a weekend; instead of having to remember to make the change on a Saturday or Sunday, or go back and update commissions for those conversions that came in after the agreed-upon date, you can be confident the change will go into effect on the date you set.

For more information about how CAKE’s advanced features will help fuel your competitive advantage as a network, check out:

If you’re a CAKE customer looking for more information on managing affiliate commissions, please visit our Knowledge Base or reach out to our Support Team.

If you’re interested in learning more about CAKE, please contact us.

Author

Garth Harris

As COO of the Affiliate Marketing Group, Garth's focus is to drive growth and adoption through the marketing and product teams while providing excellent customer service within the onboarding and support departments. During his 15 years in the affiliate marketing industry, Garth has held a wide range of roles, from client services manager to senior director of product engineering and, most recently, general manager at CAKE. These experiences have helped him build a deep understanding of his customers and their businesses. Outside of work, Garth is happiest behind a grill or at the beach with his family.